Thursday, June 22, 2006

Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig provides a pretty good overview of the "Net Neutrality" issue now before the U.S. Congress... with a link to a video presentation by the inventor of the world wide web (and my favorite uber-geek) Tim Berners-Lee.Link to LessigBlog post.Link to Real video stream of Tim Berners-Lee 4:00 minute presentation.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Test pilot Tex Johnston shows off the capabilities of Boeing's new 367-80 "Dash 80" prototype -- which would later become the Boeing 707 -- at a 1955 air show. The barrel roll (or aileron roll to others), done twice, was a no-hazard 1G maneuver for the Dash 80, but thoroughly impressed the crowd. Following the roll, it's said that William Allen turned to an elderly attender to ask for heart attack pills. (via MeFi)

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Well... looks like we've made the "big time" with a brief story on the ABC Evening News about our technology (nice going Cyril!). The piece only covers a fraction of the power and capabilities of the Navizon Wireless Positioning system for mobile devices, but I always knew that world domination wouldn't happen overnight ;-) Disclosure: I work for Mexens Technologies, home of www.Navizon.comLink to ABC News story stream (you'll have to sit through a brief video ad before viewing the piece).

Monday, June 12, 2006

Early this morning and after 43 years of service (1962-2005) the "Four Sisters" stacks of the Lakeview Generating Station in near Port Credit, Ontario (Toronto West Suburbs) were brought down by explosives in a controlled demolition.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Matt Locke, head of innovation for BBC New Media, focused on the complexities of folksonomies. He picked out six motivations behind tagging: future retrieval; contribution and sharing; attracting attention; play and competition; self presentation; and opinion and expression, which he expects to become a bigger part of tagging. That’s a move away from pure organization to a more tailored way of distributing and finding personally relevant content.He said this kind of classification, which is essentially what tagging is, is not useful in areas where hard transactions need to be done but that “there are huge areas where we can categorize using folksonomies and those gigantic spaces are generally in social media”.– He said the challenge for the BBC is to work out how people really feel about TV, what kind of things they want to say about it and how they want to link with it. There’s an API out for the new-ish BBC programme catalog and they are waiting to see how people want to use that information, expecting the most successful service in this area to be playful, content agnostic uses.

Monday, June 05, 2006

"And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you’re all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here’s the thing—it’s built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it’s a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spansih, the next thing you know, they’ll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools.

So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That’s the answer. That may not be enough—maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we’ll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we’re at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we’ll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It’s time for illegal immigrants to go—right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me.

There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don’t think you are. I don’t know if you’re tough enough to handle this. You are the most cuddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products..."

Friday, June 02, 2006

"Maybe it’s just the longtime Bruce fan in me but this actually broke through a growing fatigue with announcements of broadband “firsts” … AOL Music is posting a new exclusive video the morning after each concert in Bruce Springsteen’s just-started five-week North American tour with the Seeger Sessions Band. Video from the first four concerts is up now; the package — “18 Nights Of Bruce” — includes pix, set lists, commentary from fan site Backstreets.com, IM and email links, and, of course, a link to AOL Tickets.This may be the only way I get to experience the Seeger Sessions tour as it happens (it isn’t coming to St. Louis) so I hope the balkiness I experienced loading the video in Firefox and two versions of IE was a momentary glitch.– AOL’s effort has scale but it isn’t the first video broadband venue for the new album. The inaugural concert performance for Springsteen and the band streamed live on MSN Video as part of its New Orleans Jazz Fest coverage and is still up, along with the other video from the event."

I just watched "Oh, Mary don't you weep" from the Seger sessions tour. It's like "folk on steroids". Pretty cool.

What those dope smoking, VW van driving, bearded, beatnik hippies at Rolling Stone Magazine (in this case Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) are just figuring out now is... it's not the voting that matters... it's the counting.

About Me

* Chief Marketing Officer (cofounder) Swarmteams – a mobile social networking company based on research in the field of biology and the principals of effective collaboration found in nature (Bioteaming Manifesto).